Antidepressants may make people less neurotic

CHICAGO -- Antidepressants may go well beyond just easing the symptoms of depression; they may also make people less neurotic, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

The study of people who took GlaxoSmithKline's Paxil, known generically as paroxetine, suggests the drug may treat factors such as neuroticism that make a person more likely to be depressed in the first place.

"Our data suggests that modern antidepressants work partly by correcting key personality risk factors of depression," Tony Tang, a psychology professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, whose study appears in the journal Archives of General Psychiatry.